Finns take grand prize at wife carrying competition

Chase Millis struggles to carry Katherine Crocker through a water trap during the 2015 Texas Wife Carrying Championship, Saturday, July 18, 2015, in Houston. 56 couples compete for prizes. The 2015 Texas Wife Carrying Championship is the fourth year of the event. less

Chase Millis struggles to carry Katherine Crocker through a water trap during the 2015 Texas Wife Carrying Championship, Saturday, July 18, 2015, in Houston. 56 couples compete for prizes. The 2015 Texas Wife ... more

Photo: Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle

Photo: Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle

Image
1of/9

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 9

Chase Millis struggles to carry Katherine Crocker through a water trap during the 2015 Texas Wife Carrying Championship, Saturday, July 18, 2015, in Houston. 56 couples compete for prizes. The 2015 Texas Wife Carrying Championship is the fourth year of the event. less

Chase Millis struggles to carry Katherine Crocker through a water trap during the 2015 Texas Wife Carrying Championship, Saturday, July 18, 2015, in Houston. 56 couples compete for prizes. The 2015 Texas Wife ... more

Photo: Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle

Finns take grand prize at wife carrying competition

1 / 9

Back to Gallery

Kristina Haapanen took a feather-light step onto the bathroom scale serving as the official weigh-in device for the Texas Wife Carrying Championship, an event that not only actually exists but is in its fourth year at a Fort Bend County church.

The display flickered: 108.0.

A wisp of an exhale escaped her lungs.

At precisely the minimum weight, she would give her friend and teammate Taisto Miettinen the best possible advantage as he hauled her, clutching his back, across an obstacle course whose finish line promised strange glory and $2,000 for the fastest pair. For the first time, the little-known Texas race has drawn the couple from the sport's birthplace in Finland. They are defending world champions.

Miettenen and Haapanen found each other on an online dating site eight years ago after his previous "wife" retired from the sport. He trolled through listings looking for women near 108 pounds.

Before their 4 p.m. heat on Saturday, the duo sat outside River Pointe Church in Richmond, squinting and grimacing against the sun, weighing their degree of acclimation to the triple-digit heat index. They had flown in on Wednesday from Helsinki, where it was 54 degrees and raining, and where Miettinen is a candidate for the Finnish Parliament.

One of many odd sports

But this is no publicity hounding for the 50-year-old corporate tax lawyer, nor for 32-year-old Haapanen, a child care provider. This is but one sport of questionable origin he has dominated since long before his political career began in 2008.

Among his other odd exploits: Peat bog snorkeling, kicksledding, ditch racing, water running, winter swimming and iron bar walking, which involves clutching a pair of heavy iron bars while walking in specially designed boots. He also has volunteered his time to the Elephant Ball World Championship, a kind of soccer with a ball three times bigger.

Saturday's event, though, posed perhaps the greatest athletic challenge of his career as Texas seeks inroads into an obscure sporting market cornered heavily by Scandinavia. The midsummer sun was worth at least an extra 50 pounds.

According to Maine's Sunday River Resort, host of the North American Wife Carrying Championship and the sanctioning body for the Texas event and another in Utah, so-called wife carrying is based on a 19th century Finnish legend, "Ronkainen the Robber," who had strict measures for the men he recruited into his criminal syndicate. He tested them on a difficult course with heavy sacks or women kidnapped from neighboring villages on their backs.

While the sport's lore is overtly sexist, its true beginnings probably consisted of harmless diversion at a Finnish pub within the last few decades. There is no record of wife carrying before 1992, and some iterations of it have awarded first place finishers their weight in beer. And while one of the few written rules mandates that participants have fun, some contestants approach it with competitive determination, and the training demands are equally intense for men and women, who must exert serious upper body strength to hold on for the duration.

As they navigated a five-foot sand hill and 40-foot muddy water hazard, contestants preferred the "Estonian-style" carry, with the woman upside down on the man's back, embracing his waist and hanging legs over his shoulders. Marriage is not a requirement.

Drawn to the church

Kevin Edelbrock believes River Pointe has the only race that awards prize money. The congregation's missions and care pastor, he said another church leader years ago began seeking out unusual events as a way to attract visitors and inject levity into social gatherings. It worked. Saturday brought 112 competitors, mostly members of the local fitness community reached through social media, and scores more spectators. From a distance it looked like a small triathlon on the 100-acre campus.

The first-time attendance of the world champions from Finland offered the race a new air of legitimacy. And the Finns took the grand prize by finishing the course with a time of 1:09.15, edging out the competition by just 7 seconds.

There is no spiritual metaphor nor message, which sometimes draws criticism from other churches, Edelbrock said.

"We don't even pray before the event," he said. "Maybe I ought to, just for injuries."

Teams raced in heats of two, to avoid contact and associated penalties and mishaps. Nonetheless, a racer in the initial heat hurt his leg at the first hurdle and had to be helped off the field.

It's a course of 277 yards or 253.5 meters, another arbitrary measure in an arbitrary sport. The woman may not touch the ground at any time during the race.